More soda tax measures may be coming

RICHMOND

Updated 10:16 pm, Thursday, November 29, 2012

Richmond's soda tax may have faltered badly on election day, but the idea is now bubbling up in other Bay Area cities and counties.

Officials in San Francisco, Berkeley, Alameda County, Vallejo, El Cerrito and other jurisdictions have discussed, or plan to discuss, placing soda taxes on ballots.

"We lost the election, but the movement will eventually win," said Dr. Jeff Ritterman, the Richmond city councilman who sponsored Measure N. "Momentum is on our side."

Measure N was a penny-per-ounce tax on businesses that sell soda, juice and other sugar-sweetened drinks, and could have made Richmond the first U.S. city to pass such a tax. The tax proceeds, estimated to be about $3 million annually, would have gone to after-school sports programs, parks, juvenile diabetes education and other programs to combat childhood obesity.

But pass, it did not. The American Beverage Association spent about $2.5 million to defeat it, with billboards, mailers and door-to-door canvassers who saturated the working-class city of 105,000.

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The measure lost 67 to 33 percent. In El Monte, a Southern California city that also had a soda tax on the ballot, the measure lost 77 to 23 percent.

But that hasn't stopped Ritterman or like-minded politicians in other cities from floating the idea for future ballots. Ritterman's goal is to see 14 cities put forth soda taxes by 2014, under the theory that stretching the beverage industry's resources so thin might enable a few of the taxes to pass.

"Are we daunted by what happened in Richmond? Not at all. Not one bit," said Berkeley City Councilwoman Linda Maio, who's sponsoring a council workshop in January on the issue. "I think we all know that sugar has a skull and crossbones, and we need to be serious about changing behavior."

Berkeley might even go a step further than Richmond, she said. Berkeley might ask voters for a sales tax, which requires two-thirds approval, instead of the simple majority Richmond's business license tax needed.

In Half Moon Bay, resident Tim Pond, inspired by Richmond, has been lobbying city and San Mateo County officials to move ahead with a soda tax.

"Soda is a huge public health problem whose cost we all have to bear," said Pond, a construction project manager. "A soda tax seems really obvious to me. It's a great way to raise money for things like school sports."

The beverage industry is not exactly intimidated. The defeats in Richmond and El Monte were so overwhelming that few cities are likely to waste the time and money trying again, said Chuck Finnie, vice president of a San Francisco political consulting firm that helped fight Measure N for the beverage industry.

If activists are serious about fighting obesity, they should "focus on measures that increase access to ... quality health care and a nutritious diet," Finnie said.

Soda taxes hurt local businesses and spur consumers to buy their soda in neighboring towns, Finnie said. They do nothing to deter soda consumption, he said.

Ritterman, meanwhile, is busy pushing cities, counties and public health groups to consider soda taxes, hopefully improving on the model he put forth in Richmond.

If he could do it again, Ritterman said, he'd make it clear baby formula and possibly soy milk are excluded, and propose taxing distributors or consumers directly instead of business owners.

"Cities don't have much to lose by trying it, and there's a lot of upside," he said. "The bottom line is it's coming. A nucleus of forces has gathered to push this forward."